this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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"Productivity" is how much a worker produces in an hour. Lower productivity means either that a people have to work longer hours, or make do with less. So, who cares? Pretty much everyone.
this assumes that:
with the increase in 'productivity' over the last century, if we reduced our expectations, and stopped letting monopoly money run our entire society, and stopped burning surplus resources because it's 'unsold' or would drive down prices: we wouldn't need to work even 20% what is expected of us now.
Exactly. This neo-liberal drive to constantly grow grow grow is insanity. China produces a lot of low quality shit that goes straight into landfills, simply for the sake of producing. Productivity means nothing.
Yes and no. Productivity is not measured in physical output. It's measured in how much money people pay, which has problems, of course. If it really goes straight to the landfill, then nothing has been produced. Countries may pay for that sort of thing with taxes to create jobs, but that's not a neoliberal thing at all.
Eventually, the only reasonable way to measure productivity is in terms of what people want. That's what you do when you look at what people pay for something. Any other way would also have problems.
Failure to consider environmental degradation and resource depletion are indeed problems. Norway is a better example for this. They have a very high productivity on paper, because oil. But that basically pretends that they literally produce the oil, rather than pumping it out of the sea floor. In reality, that's more like selling off an inheritance. And that's not even considering the damage done when fossil fuels are burned.